For the first time in almost a decade of reporting liveability, Vancouver is not at the top of our ranking of 140 cities (Vancouver was in joint first position with Melbourne in the 2002 survey). Melbourne now replaces Vancouver as the most liveable city in the survey. The general conditions required for a location to be awarded a high liveability ranking continue to be well reflected in Australian and Canadian cities.
In Europe, there has been a slight depreciation in liveability driven by the current crisis in the euro zone. This is particularly the case in Greece, where austerity measures and resulting protests have driven a 2.5% fall in the score for Athens. Consequently, Athens now has a rating below those of San Juan in Puerto Rico and Montevideo in Uruguay.
The impact of the Arab Spring and civil war in Libya have also pushed down the liveability scores across the Middle East and North Africa. This is most apparent in the scoring for Tripoli (Libya), where the descent into civil war has caused such a significant deterioration in the liveability rating as to put the city into the bottom ten locations for the first time. Harare (Zimbabwe) is the lowest-scoring city at just 38.2%.
The concept of liveability is simple: it assesses which locations around the world provide the best or the worst living conditions. Assessing liveability has a broad range of uses. The survey originated as a means of testing whether Human Resource Departments needed to assign a hardship allowance as part of expatriate relocation packages. While this function is still a central potential use of the survey, it has also evolved as a broad means of benchmarking cities. This means that liveability is increasingly used by city councils, organisations or corporate entities looking to test their locations against others to see general areas where liveability can differ.
http://www.eiu.com/public/topical_report.aspx?campaignid=liveabilityAug2011
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